Homebrew Sharing Process Changes

Greetings Beyonders!

 

D&D is built around the concept that the published material is more of a set of guidelines for your games. In fact, we're encouraged to customize the content and rules as we see fit for our personal games. This idea drove the initial product design of allowing users on DDB to create homebrew data that would integrate into the toolset. 

 

We also made the decision of having two categories of homebrew:

  • private, which would only be accessible to the creator, and users in campaigns with the creator
  • published, which would be accessible to any DDB user with an active subscription

 

We also wanted to have a process to ensure that published homebrew met certain criteria. Namely, that it wasn't copyrighted material and/or imagery, wasn't vulgar, etc. This requirement lead us to put a moderation queue in place, that would require all submissions be reviewed before being shared with the entire DDB community.

 

However, even with a team of up to seven moderators, the volume of data to be reviewed grew beyond our capabilities, and the amount of time items had to sit in queue became problematic. The nature of the data prohibits us from having a fully automated solution, so, we are updating the process to rely more on community reporting and rating to help ensure the quality of the publicly available homebrew.

 

What's Changing:

 

First off, your private homebrew is always accessible to you and any users in any campaigns you belong to. You DO NOT have to share it with the community for your campaign users to have access.

 

There are now a set of automated checks in place that will prevent you from sharing your homebrew with the community if it fails these checks. They are:

  • A similarity check to WotC licensed 5e content.
  • The text in the homebrew must be in English
  • There can be no embedded images, external links, or iframes in any descriptive text.
  • There is some required data validation checks for class features and racial traits.

 

Again, your private homebrew is allowed to be anything you want. The checks above are to prevent homebrew being shared with the community that does not meet the stated criteria.

 

If your homebrew does not meet any of the criteria above, you will see a message at the top of the page and will not have access to the "Share with Community" link.

 

 

 

If your homebrew meets the automated criteria, you can click the "Share with Community" link and it will instantly be shared with the community and be visible on the public homebrew listings.

 

 

Even though your homebrew may meet the handful of automated criteria checks, you are still bound to the other criteria in the Homebrew Rules & Guidelines for sharing your homebrew with the community. Violations of these guidelines will result in the homebrew being removed from the public listings, and possible bans from sharing in the future.

 

One of the major reject reasons for publishing homebrew in the past has been the use of copyrighted images. So, to facilitate a faster sharing process, any attached images will be automatically hidden for all users other than the creator and users in campaigns with the creator. 

 

For all existing homebrew that was created before the process change (including any that are currently in the moderation queue), you will need to go to the Edit form for your homebrew and simply re-save the item to trigger the automated checks to process. You will be unable to share your homebrew with the community until that is done. If they pass all the automated checks, then you will then be able to click the "Share with Community" link on the details page and it will be immediately available.

 

Homebrew Reporting and Rating

 

Moving forward, the main ways to help promote quality content in the public homebrew listings will be the community's use of the reporting and rating features.

 

Reporting

 

 

Moderators will review reports that are issued on homebrew content. If the report is indeed a valid violation, then the homebrew item will be moved back to a private/rejected state. The creator and users in their campaigns will still have access, and the user will see a rejected reason note and be allowed to make changes to correct the item, or they can leave it as private.

 

 

 

Should you wish to make changes to fix the reported problem, then the resubmission will be placed in a queue so that the moderators can confirm the changes before making it public again.

 

Users that have repeated reports may be issued a ban from sharing any future homebrew creations with the community.

 

Rating

 

 

Rating homebrew content will help maintain the quality of the homebrew data in the listings. Each day a threshold "floor" value is calculated for each listing type (spell, monster, etc.) based on the current ratings. Any homebrew data that's been rated below the floor threshold will automatically be filtered out of the listing. The data is still accessible, we just pre-filter the listing using the new ratings filter. A user can reset the threshold value and re-filter the page should they wish to see the data below threshold. 

 

Once we have more ratings data on the listings, we'll change the default sorting on the listings from alphabetical to descending by rating. Also, we will be changing the ratings value on the listings to be a weighted composite of the item being displayed and its previous versions (if any previous versions exist). This will prevent a new version of a popular item losing its relative rank in the listings. 

 

These process changes will provide a more streamlined and faster process for users wanting to share their creations with the entire DDB community. However, the burden of trying to maintain a certain level of quality of the data is now also going to be shared with the community. Your help in reporting violating content and appropriately rating good and bad content will go a long way into helping the entire community.

 

As with everything on DDB, we will continue to monitor the homebrew system, and make adjustments and improvements when and where we can.

 

Happy brewing!

 

 

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